This is largely a response to Tony Hall’s comment here. I was composing a response and it finally dawned on me that this really should be a separate top-level discussion.
First of all, let’s consider a moment this article you linked. That is on Unz Review, but is really mirrored from this other thing called Scheerpost. What is Scheerpost? Well, Scheerpost was founded by this guy by the name of Robert Scheer, a veteran journalist who (quite veteran, turning 90 in April) when you look at his bio, he really seems to be some sort of spook. (You can disagree, of course, but that is my impression.) The star writer on Scheerpost seems to be Chris Hedges. That Patrick Lawrence guy is also a prominent person on their “team”.
Now, getting back to that article specifically, one can see that it’s very weak beer. It refers to 9/11 five times (six times if you count the title) and at no point, does it say anything at all about the 9/11 narrative. (You know, what a crock of bullshit it is…) Basically, the article is taking the controlled opposition stance that 9/11 happened (presumably, more or less as described) and then what transpired is that the U.S. overreacted to it. You know, they went berserk and started doing all this illegal stuff and torturing people and all that.
Well, let’s focus on a certain question: how dangerous is that article to the actual 9/11 criminals? (I think not much.)
If a typical American (or Canadian or westerner) reads it, yes, they may agree that the U.S. overreacted by normalizing torture in the aftermath of 2001. However, they would also think: “Well, they went crazy and overreacted but what can one expect? They were trying to protect us, after all.” From what? Another 9/11, I guess. After all, these Al Qaeda terrorists are a bunch of crazy, dangerous folks, eh?
Well, okay, said overreaction includes rather horrific things, like certain detainees were (so they say) water-boarded over a hundred times. But nowadays, I wonder whether this really happened or is not just more storytelling. For one thing, all of that is so outrageously illegal and I question whether it being outside of U.S. territory, i.e. at Guantánamo, Cuba, makes it particularly less illegal. Presumably, a military base in Cuba is under the jurisdiction of U.S. military law, that surely does not allow that kind of thing…
Still, the above is not the central point. (IMHO.) Why would they water torture some poor wretch over a hundred times? What could he possibly tell you the hundredth time he is water-boarded that he did not tell you any of the previous 99 times??? Or, in other words, besides the whole thing being evil, it is also just plain stupid. But, of course, even more to the point, the U.S. power structure surely knows perfectly well that the whole Al Qaeda hijacker story is just a fiction anyway, so are they really torturing people like this to get information from a bunch of patsies who don’t know anything anyway…
Well, I guess, finally, the point is that the story is a couple of degrees away from hanging together. The poor wretches in Guantánamo (assuming these are even real people!) are just patsies or possibly crisis actors. But even if they were real bona fide terrorists who were involved in the planning real bona fide terrorist attacks (like flying planes into buildings) it would not make sense to water-board any individual over a hundred times. It’s just demented!
So, think about it, Tony. Do you think they were holding these people extrajudicially (i.e. illegally) year after year and eventually decade after decade, torturing the shit out of them, to extract information about these fictitious terrorist attacks that were a creation of somebody’s imagination – maybe Bernard Lewis or somebody else…
Well, in short, I just tend to think that Miles Mathis is basically telling the truth when he calls out the whole thing as a hoax: https://mileswmathis.com/cgi.pdf
If Miles Mathis is right (and he is right about a surprising amount of stuff, though some of it is just silly also…), then what is the point of the fake Guántanamo story? Well, it’s a distraction, because it’s just bullshit, so that is a general purpose reason for it. But I think the more specific reason is that, finally, it reinforces much of the 9/11 story. To answer my previous question about whether any of this poses any danger to the 9/11 criminals, well, of course it doesn’t, because basically it just reinforces the 9/11 narrative. It certainly doesn’t question it! So, presumably one is to believe that 9/11 happened broadly as described, and presumably the poor wretches were being tortured there endlessly, as described, because they presumably have some connection with these terrorist attacks of 9/11 (that didn’t really happen, of course!)
By the way, you mentioned Abu Ghraib, but I think that’s a separate matter completely and it may well be that that did largely happen as described – mostly some rogue thing carried out by some dimwits. More orless. I’m not 100% sure. But then, I would just close this by pointing out that the U.S. power structure has dropped every pretense of saying that there is any connection whatsoever between Iraq and 9/11. They admit that was always bullshit. (Of course, there was no connection between Bin Laden/Al Qaeda and 9/11 either, but they’re not admitting that!) So, any mistreatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, even taking their BS narratives at face value, has nothing to do with preventing another 9/11 or any other such nonsense.
(I write that last paragraph perhaps mostly for the sake of completeness, but it also makes me ponder on how difficult it can be to untangle all the layers of bullshit they have constructed!)